Video 5:34
The Territory band wooing Germany

Lauren DayUpdated
Fri Apr 26 18:56:00 EST 2013

NT band Worldfly travels to Germany to launch its second album.

Transcript

DANIELLE PARRY, PRESENTER: It's a long way from Darwin to Deutschland, but that's been the musical journey for local band Worldfly. The group is about to release its second album in Germany, before the Australian launch later this year. But Darwin fans will get a taste of the new work this weekend at Worldfly's only Australian performance ahead of the band's European tour. Lauren Day reports.

LAUREN DAY, REPORTER: It's the big sound that's big in Berlin. And it's been a big journey for Territory band Worldfly.

MICHAEL MAHER, VOCALIST: The name was founded in Germany. I was living there at the time and I really actually sort of started to see things not as separate countries divided by borders, I felt like it was more, when you live in another country for a long time, you do start to realise that it's all kind of related so Worldfly was just an idea of that.

LAUREN DAY: Like so many young Australians, lead singer Michael Maher left his home town of Tennant Creek and crossed the seas with a backpack and two itchy feet. He soon found himself in Germany and stayed for ten years.

MICHAEL MAHER, VOCALIST: I can remember the first day that I got there, driving from the airport out to where my friend lived just coming from Tennant Creek where it's flat and dry and desert-like, those rolling hills and the beautiful pine trees and it was kind of an Autumn day and I remember saying in the car 'gee, it's so green here!' because I just wasn't used to it and I remember just thinking 'this is beautiful'.

LAUREN DAY: But there's no place like the Territory and he eventually returned home, forming Worldfly shortly afterwards. The red dust of his childhood now swirls together with the European dirt on his shoes, to make a unique sound.

MICHAEL MAHER, VOCALIST: I had a lot of freedom in Tennant Creek, there wasn't much pressure so I kind of, there was a lot of thinking about, I lot of time to think and think sort of big and outwardly rather than being focussed in on the daily race you know, so I spent a lot of time daydreaming.

LAUREN DAY: Worldfly released its first album in 2009 and sold 10-thousand copies in Europe. The band has performed in Germany, Switzerland, France, London and Belgium.

MICHAEL MAHER, VOCALIST: The German crowd is big music lovers, they really love it and they're very open with their applause, they're very forthcoming with their feeling towards the music so they're a great audience to play to because if they love something, they really show it.

LAUREN DAY: Now with a slightly different line-up of musicians and armed with a new album, the band's members are again packing their bags for Germany.

JARREN BOYD, DRUMMER: For me it's really exciting, it's the most exciting thing I've ever done so the best thing anyone could do for us I suppose is just to listen because we've spent sort of two and a half years just working on this record and then a couple of years just promoting and rehearsing the one before.

MICHAEL HOHNEN, PERAMBULATOR RECORDS CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Look, I think what they've produced in the new record is, I rang them up and said 'look, I think this is an album of the year' we're not going to release it in Australia until later in the year but they're going to premiere it at the show. They're incredibly dedicated musicians and they don't stop at anything that's not world standard or comparable here or anywhere else.

LAUREN DAY: Michael Hohnen has helped develop the careers of Top End musicians like Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. He says Worldfly is proof that Territory talent is a growing export.

MICHAEL HOHNEN, PERAMBULATOR RECORDS CREATIVE DIRECTOR: If you take a quick snapshot of what's happened in the Territory so far with Jessica Mauboy, with Gurrumul, hopefully now with Worldfly, I think that that shows that you can produce something from anywhere. When you're working in Sydney or Melbourne you're competing with 10-thousand other bands. Up here, you probably develop your own psyche if you like around what the band can do and what it can sound like.

JARREN BOYD, DRUMMER: Some people they believe they have to move to the capitals of the world, like not even Melbourne and Sydney but say Los Angeles or New York or London or something like that, if you really want to make it you've got to be where the centre of the music is but that's kind of not the model we've decided to follow, we think we can really work on our sound here and our album and our image or whatever, we can work on our sound here and export it from here.